Multistreamed Web Transport for Developing Regions

摘要

A multistreamed web transport has the potential to reduce head-of-line (HOL) blocking, and improve response times in high latency Internet browsing environments, typical of developing regions. In our position paper [13], we proposed a design for HTTP over the multistreamed Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP), and implemented the design for non-pipelined (HTTP 1.0) transactions in the Apache web server and Firefox web browser. We have since adapted Apache and Firefox to handle HTTP 1.1 persistent, pipelined transfers over SCTP streams. Initial emulation results over high latency paths reveal that HTTP over SCTP streams benefits from faster page downloads, and achieves visually perceivable improvements to pipelined objects' response times. Movies comparing page downloads of HTTP/TCP vs. HTTP/SCTP streams can be found on the author's website [12]. The promising results have motivated us to propose a low cost, easily realizable, gateway-based HTTP over SCTP deployment solution to enhance users' browsing experience in developing regions.